release etexts that are 99.9% accurate in the eyes of the general reader. Given the preferences our proofreaders have, and the general lack of reading ability the public is currently reported to have, we probably exceed those requirements by a significant amount. However, for the person who wants an 'authoritative edition' we will have to wait some time until this becomes more feasible. We do, however, intend to release many editions of Shakespeare and the other classics for comparative study on a scholarly level."

In August 1998, Michael Hart wrote in an email interview: "My own personal goal is to put 10,000 etexts on the net [this goal was reached in October 2003] and if I can get some major support, I would like to expand that to 1,000,000 and to also expand our potential audience for the average etext from 1.x% of the world population to over 10%, thus changing our goal from giving away 1,000,000,000,000 etexts to 1,000 times as many, a trillion and a quadrillion in U.S. terminology."

# 1,000 to 10,000 ebooks

From 1998 to 2000, the "output" was an average of 36 books per month.

Project Gutenberg reached 2,000 ebooks in May 1999. eBook #2000 was "Don Quijote" (1605), by Cervantes, in Spanish, its original language.

Project Gutenberg reached 3,000 ebooks in December 2000. eBook #3000 was "A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs" (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower), vol. 3 (1919), by Marcel Proust, in French, its original language.

Project Gutenberg reached 4,000 ebooks in October 2001. eBook #4000 was "The French Immortals Series" (1905), in English. This book is an anthology of short fictions by authors from the French Academy (Académie française): Emile Souvestre, Pierre Loti, Hector Malot, Charles de Bernard, Alphonse Daudet, and others.

Project Gutenberg reached 5,000 ebooks in April 2002. eBook #5000 was "The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci" (early 16th century). Since its release, this ebook has stayed in the Top 100 of downloaded books.

In 1988, Michael Hart chose to type in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Peter Pan" because they would each fit on one 360 K disk, the standard of the time. In 2002, the standard disk was 1.44 M and could be compressed as a ZIP file.

A practical file size is about 3 million characters, more than long enough for the average book. The ASCII version of a 300- page novel is 1 M. A bulky book can fit in two ASCII files, that can be downloaded as is or in ZIP format. An average of 50 hours is necessary to get an ebook selected, copyright-cleared, scanned, proofread, formatted and assembled.

A few numbers are reserved for "special" books. For example, eBook #1984 is reserved for George Orwell's classic, published in 1949, and still a long way from falling into public domain.

The "output" in 2001 and 2002 was an average of 100 books per month.

In spring 2002, Project Gutenberg's ebooks represented 25% of all the public domain works freely available on the web, an impressive result if we think of all the pages that were scanned and proofread by thousands of volunteers in several countries.

1,000 ebooks in August 1997, 2,000 ebooks in May 1999, 3,000 ebooks in December 2000, 4,000 ebooks in October 2001, 5,000 ebooks in April 2002, 10,000 ebooks in October 2003. eBook #10000 was The Magna Carta, signed in 1215 and known as the first English constitutional text.

From April 2002 to October 2003, in 18 months, the collections doubled, going from 5,000 ebooks to 10,000 ebooks, with a monthly average of 300 new ebooks. The fast growth was the work of Distributed Proofreaders, a website launched in October 2000 by Charles Franks to share the proofreading of books between many volunteers. Volunteers choose one of the books available on the site and proofread a given page. It is recommended they do a page per day if possible.

Books were also copied on CDs and DVDs. As blank CDs and DVDs cost next to nothing, Project Gutenberg began burning and sending a free CD or DVD to anyone asking for it. People were encouraged to make copies for a friend, a library or a school. Released in August 2003, the "Best of Gutenberg" CD contained 600 ebooks. The first Project Gutenberg DVD was released in December 2003 to celebrate the first 10,000 ebooks, with the burning of most titles (9,400 ebooks).

# 10,000 to 20,000 ebooks

In December 2003, there were 11,000 ebooks, which represented 110 G, in several formats (ASCII, HTML, PDF and others, as is or zipped). In May 2004, there were 12,600 ebooks, with represented 135 G. With more than 300 new books added per month (338 books per month in 2004), the number of gigabytes was expected to double every year.

The Project Gutenberg Consortia Center (PGCC) was affiliated with Project Gutenberg in 2003, and became an official Project Gutenberg site. Since 1997, PGCC had been working on gathering collections of existing ebooks, as a complement to Project Gutenberg focusing on the production of ebooks.

In January 2005, Project Gutenberg had 15,000 ebooks. eBook #15000 was "The Life of Reason" (1906), by George Santayana.

What about languages? There were ebooks in 25 languages in February 2004, and in 42 languages in July 2005, including Sanskrit and the Mayan languages. The seven top languages - with more than 50 books - were English (with 14,548 ebooks on July 27, 2005), French (577 ebooks), German (349 ebooks), Finnish (218 ebooks), Dutch (130 ebooks), Spanish (103 ebooks), and Chinese (69 ebooks). There were ebooks in 50 languages in December 2006. The ten top languages were English (with 17,377 books on December 16, 2006), French (966 books), German (412 books), Finnish (344 books), Dutch (244 books), Spanish (140 books), Italian (102 books), Chinese (69 books), Portuguese (68 books), and Tagalog (51 books).

Project Gutenberg was also spreading worldwide.

In July 2005, Project Gutenberg Australia (launched in 2001) had 500 ebooks.

In Europe, Project Rastko, based in Belgrade, Serbia, launched Distributed Proofreaders Europe (DP Europe) in December 2003 and Project Gutenberg Europe (PG Europe) in January 2004. Project Gutenberg Europe released its first 100 ebooks in June 2005. These books were in several languages, as a reflection of European linguistic diversity, with 100 languages planned for the long term.

New teams were working on launching Project Gutenberg Canada,
Project Gutenberg Portugal and Project Gutenberg Philippines.

In December 2006, Project Gutenberg had 20,000 ebooks. eBook #20000 was the audiobook of "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, 1869), by Jules Verne, in its English version.

If 32 years were necessary to digitize the first 10,000 books - between July 1971 and October 2003 -, 3 years and 2 months were necessary to digitize the following 10,000 books - between October 2003 and December 2006.

The section Project Gutenberg PrePrints was set up in January 2006 to collect items submitted to Project Gutenberg which were interesting enough to be available online, but not ready yet to be added to the main Project Gutenberg collections, the reason being missing data, low-quality files, formats which were not handy, etc. This new section had 379 files in December 2006.

# Tens of thousands of ebooks

In December 2006, Mike Cook launched Project Gutenberg News as "the news portal for gutenberg.org", a website to complement the existing weekly and monthly newsletters. It has showed for example the weekly, monthly and yearly production stats since 2001.

The weekly production was 24 ebooks in 2001,